I have never seen an argument against crypto currency that doesn't already apply to the current systems, we just pretend its not the same.
0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/10/18/...
> I have never seen an argument against crypto currency that doesn't already apply to the current systems, we just pretend its not the same.
This is wrong. While they are imperfect, the US government has a much better developed body of law and practice to protect citizens from its actions than Google does. Citizens have much more leverage over what laws are written than they have over the terms in Google's TOS.
Google reserves the right to unilaterally terminate its relationship with for you for any reason with little to no ability to appeal, and regularly exercises that right. When it does that, you lose access to all accounts and all data you've stored with them. If the government were like that, it'd regularly be revoking people's citizenships and confiscating all of their property without even giving a reason, let alone a trial. The US government doesn't do that, and if it did it would be illegal.
In my view, cryptocurrency is in fact more primitive and less advanced than government currency in all but a few narrow, technical senses. There's a huge amount of valuable social technology that most cryptocurrencies just threw away for ideological reasons.
I disagree that's an accurate way of stating it. IRS isn't lawless, and unlike Google it doesn't unilaterally write its own laws. It's got significant internal controls that prevent it from lawlessly "seize[ing] assets, garnish[ing] wages, place[ing] liens, etc" without relying on necessary cooperation from non-government actors to keep it in check. The US Government as a whole is also inhibited from much lawlessness through deliberately designed checks and balances and other mechanisms, mechanisms that are largely absent in private corporations like Google. Then there are elections, which provide some measure of accountability to the general population; rather than a smaller, self-interested set of shareholders as is the case with Google.
All these mechanisms aren't perfect, but their importance needs to be understood and recognized.
Google/FB have to ... well, nothing. I have the same say with them as I would with a video game company and in-game gold. They could decide I simply don't exist. Ticket closed. Block chain (from the implementations I have seen) does not solve this.
Google is far less likely to ever let you tell them what they can or can't do, even as a regulator. The government is you, fundamentally, while Google is not.
When the nature of the problem is such that rational customer behavior leads to one player taking all, the market deteriorates, and customers lose the benefits of competition.
This is a problem that the anti-monopoly laws exist to solve.
Another body of law prevents the federal government from seizing all the power, and to keep different branches on power competing without mergers and acquisitions of each other.
An anarchist / libertarian approach would work if minting your own interoperable coin was possible and reasonable. With gold coins, it is (was) technically trivial. Digital currency has still to solve this.
Not only that, but all these self-cryptos would be backed by the word of the person, and people lie, so you could potentially just end up with a whole bunch of crypto coins worth nothing in the end.
Gold has some intrinsic value (you can make stuff out of it at least). Same for makeshift currencies like the Tide detergent.
US dollars are backed by US industrial and military power.
Random crypto tokens have about as much value as paper money: they are relatively hard to produce, but not very much so. They need to be backed by a power / reputation of some kind, or a directly consumable resource of some kind, to be widely usable.
If the USD has $1TT stolen or an anti-counterfeit measure is bypassed, the US government could step in and support use of the dollar with some guarantee or security advancement like better counterfeiting protections or freezing stolen assets then (as bad as it is often seen) printing replacement bills or something. Some of this is already ongoing with the Mint developing anti-counterfeit measures for each new bill released.
Crypto can't do that, it's just a volatile stock like commodity with no underwritten assets or real world backing. There's no centralized backer that can prop it up in crisis. That's risky.
Even the insane concept of asset forfeiture in the USA is on its way out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/us/politics/civil-asset-f...
Easy side to choose I'd say
Also, do not confuse functional with efficient. Efficiency is at a third place way bellow fairness and efectivity on a government's priority.
Short answer: yes. Don't dismiss the good because it's not perfect.
And there is still due process - flawed as it might be for governments - which Google does not even need to pretend it does.
I'd say it's a step sideways.
The USD or any fiat currency is not controlled democratically or by a democratic entity either. When was the last time we heard of a vote before increasing the money supply of a nation's currency? If there is a vote, it is done by people who have not been democratically elected.
>I have never seen an argument against crypto currency that doesn't already apply to the current systems, we just pretend its not the same.
It's not the same: cryptocurrencies are generally more restrictive about reversing transactions (in that you can't), for instance. We can reverse some transactions in the current system.
Some call this a feature, but they're likely okay with every day people getting their shit stolen easily because they don't know anything about computer security.
It's a middleman or escrow who performs this service. Credit Cards and banks act as the middlemen to reverse transactions. No reason cryptos can't have those too. I imagine Uphold or Coinbase or whoever can serve this function.
as far as people being thieved I would agree that it is important to shore up computer security. Physical wallets and stashes of cash also are stolen when security is lax. Again, a middleman might play a role to secure, just as banks do for USD/EUR /etc. Giving money to a bank is essentially delegating the protection of your savings. The alternative being a home safe or under a mattress where the security remains the holder's responsibility.
To me, electronic cash is far from the first thing on the chopping block when we look at the sheer wastefulness of our society.
Maybe the externalities should be priced into the cost of energy so that we don't have to conduct these witchhunts on how others spend their energy, like whether they use a dish washer or clothes dryer or A/C. Seems inconsistent to me.
We are comparing the energy consumption of crypto currencies vs regular money. From what I read (granted, not much), Bitcoin would not scale to the current usage of regular money.
From [1]:
"Digiconomist compared bitcoin's network energy consumption to another payment system like Visa. It reports that bitcoin consumed the equivalent energy of nearly 2.8 million U.S. households, while Visa's consumption numbers around 50,000 U.S. households."
"That's about 0.13 percent of total global electricity consumption, according to Digiconomist. That would rank bitcoin as 61st if it were its own country."
"Bitcoin mining uses more electricity than […] Ireland or Nigeria."
"Nearly 10 U.S. households can be powered for one day by the electricity consumed for a single bitcoin transaction"
Nothing remotely comparable to using a dishwasher. And all this is considering that very few people use Bitcoin.
> how others spend their energy
It's not a problem at the individual level. It's not "other spending their energy". It's people spending everybody's resources. This cannot be solved with money.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumpti...
The Cambridge bitcoin electricity consumption index is probably a more superior and realistic model.
Yes it uses electricity, (what doesn't these days), but it is often renewable and excess power that would otherwise not be used e.g Hydro in China.
So it's not as bad as it seems, doesn't mean it can't be improved, but electricity consumption is not the issue digiconomist makes it out to be.